Large networks, such as the Internet, provide the infrastructure for many peer-to-peer systems and are now being used to provide a variety of services to users. Some recent Internet applications require high bandwidth. Live, high-quality, streaming video, video conferencing, and graphic-intensive multiplayer games are examples of high-bandwidth applications.
A fundamental challenge in effectively utilizing high-bandwidth network services is to provide these services and other data transmission without affecting the quality of the services. Quality of Service (QoS) routing is a major factor in providing these services. However, selecting routes that provide the performance required by the service is difficult.
Accurately measuring metrics for computing network routes can be difficult. This is especially true when determining bandwidth. Measuring bandwidth is a computational and resource intensive process. It is difficult to conduct bandwidth measurements for large networks, such as the Internet, having a large number of paths. Measuring simultaneously on multiple paths may cause interference to measurement tools and may generate cross traffic, thus making it difficult to get accurate measurements in real-time. Furthermore, bandwidth changes quite rapidly and the measurements need to be updated frequently. In a large network, continuously measuring bandwidth would be infeasible because of the large measurement overhead.